'Fun Size' is in the mold of movies like 'Adventures in Babysitting', and though it dusts off all of the old genre tropes, it does so with a likable enough charm.In typical Hollywood fashion we're supposed to believe that girls who look like Victoria Justice and Jane Levy are unpopular, but both young actresses are talented enough to pull off their somewhat dorky characters and make us forget--for 90 minutes at least--that they're drop dead beautiful. But it's young Jackson Nicoll (of 'Bad Grandpa' fame) as little brother Albert who steals the show.Not really funny so much as amusing, 'Fun Size' is an entertaining, if disposable, little treat.

The film is about: a teen-aged nerd girl growing up, thinking about college, boys, school.The film is about: a single mother's attempt to have romance with two kids on hand.The film is about: losing a pudgy, mischievous, pre-school aged boy on Halloween night, then trying to find him.How well do these themes fit together?Joy is going to a party with Keevin, so she assigns Albert to Wren. Unfortunately, Aaron Riley invites her to a party. Looks like conflict of interest. Even before the party, she loses Albert in the first haunted house they go to. Albert makes his way around on his own, oddly enough. Albert hooks up with a convenience store clerk. Wren just misses him, but spends time with some of her fellow teens, mostly Roosevelt. The clerk fouls up and gets his car towed; Albert gets into the car as it's towed, since his jackalantern full of candy was in it. Wren targets the chicken place, since Albert loves it. Unfortunately, they take a slow route, and he evades them. Roosevelt's 'borrowed' car breaks down. They just barely miss Albert again as Galaxy Scout intercepts him. Roosevelt screws up royally, and backs the car into the chicken building, and knocks the huge, animated chicken off the top of the building onto the car.Joy finds that the host of the party Keevin invited her to lives with his parents, and most of the attendees are quite definitely younger than she is. Galaxy Scout takes Albert to the party where Joy is. Unfortunately, he leaves with the enormous scumbag (Joergen) who stole all his Halloween candy. The clerk sees the scumbag with Albert in the back of his convertible. Joy gets to know the hosts of the party, which is weird, but is a bit therapeutic for her. She goes home and sees that Wren and Albert are not back yet.Does Wren get Albert back from Joergen? Do Wren and Roosevelt ever clear the air?-----Scores------Cinematography: 10/10 Looks good.Sound: 6/10 No particular problems. Stupid incidental music.Acting: 6/10 Thumbs down: Jackson Nicoll, Chelsea Handler, Thomas McDonell, Johnny Knoxville. Thumbs up: Thomas Mann, Riki Lindhome, Jane Levy.Screenplay: 6/10 The basic ideas are okay, but it might have been better if Robert Altman had written and directed it. In less capable hands, this did not work all that well. There were too many balls in the air. Most of them dropped to the ground.

Fun Size- *1/2 (out of four): There are more laughs and more fun in an episode of "Victorious" than in this farce of a film, which would have fared better had it been released straight to DVD. It is crudely written, the teenage qualms seem entirely artificial and clichéd. There are some funny and even sweet moments in it, but the bad outweighs the good here. It tries to pay homage to older (and better) teen flicks of the '80s, but it falls far short, emerging as little more than a comedy full of gags and stereotypical characters. It might be enjoyable for a small minority of people, but I'm sure most will be quite bored by it. Definitely one to skip.

Nickelodeon Movies made a gamble with Fun Size which, while it wasn't as successful as I'm sure they wanted it to be, has nonetheless made the company seem like more risk-takers than, I believe, the public thought they were. Despite baring the name of a popular kids' TV channel, most of their projects have been uphill marketing battles attempting to acquaint the public with different plots and new characters that weren't introduced on their networks. There have been a number of films banking off their own characters, but Nickelodeon Movies doesn't play it safe when it comes to making family comedies or dramas. They stray from the nest and that's an honorable thing.However, one must expect when a company does what Nickelodeon Movies is doing, the result is all over the place. Fun Size, their second PG-13 film, attempting to usher in a more tween/teen fanbase (I suppose), is the company's latest film. It merges the likes of John Hughes-style teen comedies and Adventures in Babysitting schtick to create a relatively harmless (at least by the company's program-standards) but ultimately forgettable endeavor in the formula of misunderstandings and chaotic mishaps. This is, yes, another entry in the tired genre I call, "maximum antics, minimum laughter," a film that has so many different setups and quirky events that it forgets to make them funny and entertaining.Our story concerns unpopular high school teen Wren DeSantis (Victoria Justice - take one look at her and you know that in no American high school would she be unpopular), who lives with her irresponsible mother (Chelsea Handler) and her psychotic deviant of a brother named Albert (Jackson Nicoll) in a classic suburbia setting. It's Halloween, which is, of course, the holiday Wren's town goes crazy trying to celebrate, and her and her friend April (Jane Levy) are invited to Aaron Riley's (Thomas McDonell) Halloween party where he might, just might, sing a song in Wren's honor. She is lovestruck.Yet, the same night, Wren's mother is going out with her much younger boyfriend and leaves Wren in charge of Albert. Her and Wren reluctantly take Albert trick-or-treating, but not long after, he goes missing in the huge town of Cleveland, Ohio and this leaves the two friends confused and without a clue. That sweet-talk the hell out of their nerdy classmates Roosevelt (Thomas Mann) and Peng (Osric Chau) to give them a ride to help them look all over town to find the little tike and, as you imagine, trouble of unprecedented caliber ensues.Victoria Justice, who is gifted here as a conflicted teenager, has unfortunately been placed in the center of the mediocre teen-sitcom Victorious, which airs daily on Nickelodeon. The show is one of the many programs targeted towards kids that features smiley teen faces reciting poorly written lines that are foreign to the way high-schoolers truly behave. They treat emotional resonance as the lowest form of sympathy, human interest as an unheard-of concept, and humor as a non-existent device. One thing Fun Size capitalizes off of is cursing, which for a Nickelodeon-billed movie, is quite an accomplishment. It's definitely significant, and provides the film with a bit more realism with the way teenagers talk and communicate than shows like Victorious or movies like Prom willfully neglect. I'm not saying in order for a teen film to be realistic and be successful is to welcome cursing (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a wonderfully poetic and immensely successful film concerning the lives of three outcasts, worked well without swearing more than a few times), but when you see teenagers calling each other "nubs," "geeks," or use phrases like "nerd juice," do you see reality or an augmented version of it? While Justice's capabilities as an actress stand out, most of the film is on autopilot and most of the characters are remarkably unremarkable. Albert, who utters only two words in the entire runtime of the film for reasons never explained, is a brat; not a character to sympathize with at all, but one to unsympathetically put in an institution. His misbehaving acts, incredibly hyperactive attitude, and schematic tendencies do not show us likability in any way, shape, or form. Wren's friend April, another self-indulgent character, only upset about the fact that she is missing the party being thrown by the hottest kid in school, is not even remotely likable, either, and Roosevelt and Peng are simply love-interests and helpful nerds that come in the nick of time.This is director Josh Schwartz's first motion picture after quite a resume of primetime cable programs, none of which I've seen. There's a competence to his work, but it isn't significant enough to distinguish from the other films of similar style we've been bombarded with over the years. Writer Max Werner pleasantly evokes realism through dialog, yet relationships are shortchanged in the long run for continuous idiocy. The other big issue I can find with Fun Size is that it's demographically confused. It's a tad too adult for kids under ten and eleven, and those over fourteen are a little "too old" for this kind of material. Much like Prom, there's a strange lack of a demographic here, that always seems to young or too old.Fun Size, also, features one of the most immature, juvenile, and off-putting movie endings in quite sometime, which shows the darkside of Albert, as if his personality already wasn't dark enough. In the long run, like a "fun size" candy-bar, it's sweet, easy to swallow, but not memorable after, say, half an hour. It provides spry, quick-witted closure for those brave enough to seek it. There's not too much wrong with that.Starring: Victoria Justice, Jane Levy, Thomas Mann, Osric Chau, Thomas McDonell, and Chelsea Handler. Directed by: Josh Schwartz.